TEXTBOOK

I have written about Takeuchi Kimiaki (1948-2011) before in my blog and suffice it to say, he was a giant within the field of modern Tokoname pottery. Takeuchi took cues and direction from not only his master, Ezaki Issei, but fellow Tokoname potters such as Osako Mikio and Ogawa Yukihiko. Together, the group forged a rebirth into the pottery of Tokoname and each became synonymous with their own unique styling. Illustrated is a large hachi by Takeuchi Kimiaki that could stand as the textbook or signature style of his body of work. The surface has had a glassy green ash glaze "flung" across its surface with careful and well thought out design and the rest of the pot is adorned with effects of a wood firing that has peppered the surface with speckles of ash and the body richly reduced by charcoal created during the firing. As I mentioned, this style of plate is a classic example of his work and I have seen several of this hachi in print used to represent the potter for a vivid and creative style he was well known for. I am always amazed at the clash between such a perfectly thrown plate adorned with what appears to be such casual decoration; a method that is well practiced and highly successful as it was developed from the very core of a modern Tokoname potter.

IRON & ASH

I am still in the process of playing with the Oribe glaze I am calling Shin-Oribe. It is a very forgiving glaze and takes meddling with it quite well. Currently I am using a thin iron and ash glaze over it to give it a greater depth of color and activity which in turn leads to a significant amount of the outer glaze running. Illustrated is a recent paddled water jar with the Shin-Oribe and iron-ash glaze over. The paddled texture together with the running surface gives the pot a much more animated surface and in the end, leads to a more interesting pot. My next time out, I plan to add a handful of ash to the Oribe glaze itself and see where that takes it and as with many things it is the journey of the testing and serendipity that is the greatest reward.

You can see a few more pictures of this Oribe water jar over on my Trocadero marketplace; http://www.trocadero.com/stores/albedo3studio/items/1247842/item1247842store.html

"It  does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop."    Confucius

 

 

IN USE

I recently had a very pretty seihakuji benisai vase by Morino Kako pass through my hands. The vase has found a new home and the new owner sent me a picture of the pot in use in front of her fireplace. There is always something exceptionally satisfying about seeing pots being used for the everyday, the formal occasion and for varying ceremony, it is the fait acompli for most pottery. In this particular case the evocative, lush green and yellow of the iris amplifies the colors and purpose of the vase and adds a punctuation to the function of the Chinese inspired vase. As a functional potter, a pot in use is a pot complete.

(Photo courtesy of a private collector.)

YOHEN

Illustrated is a large and simple yunomi with a rather interesting glaze over thick slip. The glaze is called yohen, for kiln change and varies depending on how the kiln is fired. Using a feldspar/amblygonite base the glaze is capable of a wide array of surfaces including this highly iridescent one especially over slips with varying additions of oxides and carbonates. For those of you unfamiliar with amblygonite, it is a rather neat material having certain properties similar to both spodumene and lepidolite and is worth testing out from cone 6 to10. All in all this a rather fun glaze to use and the texture and movement added to the piece with the use of a thick slip just adds to the experience.

10,000 HOURS

There is that old adage that it takes 10,000 hours to master something or become an expert at it. I wonder how that relates to a potter with a piece of bamboo cutting the kodai on a pot, is it relative to hours or number of pots? If you think about how many pots a potter makes, especially a Japanese potter who hand cuts the feet on many of his pieces, how many pieces did it take to get good at mastering what seems to be such a simple task that is in fact, exceptionally difficult? The illustration is a video grab from a video of Suzuki Osamu cutting a foot out of fairly wet clay with only a sharpened piece of wood. His cuts are direct, fast and well practiced, almost to a formula, but if you have seen many feet on his pots, it is obvious each and every one has its own personality and distinctness while relating back to his body of his work. As I watch his video, I ask myself, does it ever get as easy as he makes it appear?

MYTHIC

Illustrated is a handbuilt beaked pitcher I made a long while back, I recently found the slides and had them converted to digital. Relying on a bit of myth with some liberties taken in terms of the details, the pitcher depicts the tale of Icarus, portrayed as a female on the one side and Europa and the Bull on the other, and yes I know that Zeus was portrayed as a white bull but black worked better for the graphics! I have always been rather fascinated with world mythology and it routinely makes its way onto my pots in a wide variety of depictions from representational to abstract. In this example, the fully functional pitcher presented two large panels to paint on owing some homage to ancient Greek and Roman fresco. At the end of the day, this was a fun pot to build and even more fun to paint.

Here is a classic from the very late 1980s; Michael Penn NO MYTH (1989)

 

YU-TV

Here is another short NHK promotional video for a special on Bizen Ningen Kokuho; Fujiwara Yu (1932-2001). Following in his father's rather large footsteps, Fujiwara Yu produced a large number of exceedingly well fired pots as well as a body of large tsubo of varying forms as well. Enjoy the video, a great place to brush up on your Nihongo at the same time.

THOSE FAMILIAR ARCHES

Cloaked in a soft, vellum like Persian blue glaze the all too familiar repeated arches design remind one of an ancient cathedral or Roman temple from ages long past. Combining the modern skills of the potter, together with an ancient tradition and design, the vase stands calmly while evoking a myriad of associations, something ever present in the works of the late Kato Kenji. His works have a sense of endurance and longevity that is not always captured by potters. Like the archetypes, I always sense a dependence on the past while looking far into the future using elements and techniques of a time gone by; Kato Kenji stands on the shoulders of numerous potters who laid the foundations for a noble tradition that has made its way to the 21st century.

T&A

Illustrated is a T&A (thrown and altered) ishime style teapot with my "landscapeman" design incised and inlaid around the piece. The pot started life as a simple cylinder that was then altered by making it oval, darting the clay and reassembling the form as it appears. Once assembled, I put it on the wheel and created the mouth and short neck to accept a thrown lid. The spout, lid, foot and handle have all been glazed in a shiny transparent black glaze to add contrast to the piece and the interior has a clear liner glaze as well. I would love to claim this was entirely my idea, but it actually stems from a TV show I saw while in Japan. On the show, a woman took a sheet of paper, made it into a cylinder and then made a few cuts and a few moments later, there was a ball. It only seemed natural that you could take the original idea and adapt it to clay, just waiting to be turned into a teapot.

KO-BIZEN

When I think about Bizen, there is modern Bizen and there is what is known as Ko-Bizen, which means, simply, "old Bizen". Though you can look at the term Ko-Bizen on face value, I tend to look at it as a tradition that set the standards, style, techniques, firing and quality for Bizen rather than just referring to pre-modern pottery. Pots today are definitely made in the Ko-Bizen tradition though they are modern pots, in essence they build on all that was old to continue that unbroken thread to the present day. For Kitaoji Rosanjin that was a great part of his pursuit of pottery, especially in his Bizen, Shigaraki, Iga, Oribe and Shino works. He would study the great works of times past to understand the nature, intent and spirit of those pieces and do all in his power to instill the same in his own work though allowing his voice to the surface of the pot. The illustrated Bizen chawan is certainly one of those works that straddles the temporal fence between the past and the present (at the time it was made). This streamlined, purposeful bowl  creates a powerful posture and is wonderfully colored with rich purple to brown fire color and a face and lip painted with ash, adding to the landscape of the pot. What Rosanjin managed to create is a chawan that absolutely speaks to the past while maintaining its place as a 20th century pot.

"That is why I turn to the works of the ancient masters and seek to read their hearts. Nothing makes me happier than to discover, little by little, that I can read the heart of some ancient potter - for I too want my work to be a reflection of the heart. When I succeed in creating a piece straight from the heart, I can't help slapping my knee and thinking "This is how it was for the ancients!" *

(* A quote from THE ART OF ROSANJIN  by Cardozo and Hirano)

O-JU-WAN

Illustrated is a chawan that belongs to a friend which I refer to as O-Ju-Wan, the big Ju bowl. This chawan was made by Shimizu Uichi (1926-2004) and is a Horai style bowl glazed in a rich black iron glaze with a frothy white laid over and then the kanji for Ju carved or inscribed into the surface. Working in his nobori-gama, Horai-yu, Shimizu created a wide variety of rich iron glazes from deep black iron saturated ones to celestial appearing kannyu celadon style seiji glazes with deep crazing creating worlds within their surfaces. This particular bowl has a lovely form with the Ju kanji dominating the face of the bowl intended to bring felicitations and longevity to both user and viewer. The playful interplay of glaze textures, inscribed decoration and clay body cloak the full round form of a generous and sturdy chawan well at home in hand or commanding a space as a reminder of the intent of both potter and pot; enjoy.

iii3

I am not sure why, but for me, the incised decoration and Oribe seem to go hand in hand. The way the glaze first breaks to a much lighter color only to fill that incised channel with a dark river of Oribe makes the technique very appealing. Though the idea of the incised line goes way back in pottery history, it is the work of Kohyama Yasuhisa, Koie Ryoji, Charles Counts and Aaron Bohrod that have been of the greatest inspiration and influence in what I do with the cut line. The technique is both primal and expressive, literal and obtuse and allows a potter direct access to the clay, cutting in to the surface and moving material as you go along. The other appeal is that spontaneity goes hand in hand with the directness of the technique, like ink on a fresh piece of paper, there is no going back, the line cut is the line that one lives with and there is a fair share of cast always and wasters along the route. Using a sharpened piece of bamboo as a tool, it takes practice to get gentle curves and small detail, but like all things worth the effort, it is only the first 10,000 hours that serve to get you where you are going.

Illustrated is a thrown stoneware bottle, tokkuri with an decoration loosely based on the orbit in some far off incised interstellar intersection of stars. In a way this decoration is an offshoot of my "landscapeman" design but it owes as much to the blackboards of science fiction scientists in old B movies as anything else. The Oribe glaze works well over the incised decoration and though not quite apparent in the photo, the surface has a slight iridescence to it. I have only one question, how is it possible that no one in the US is mining ceramic grade lepidolite?

JUN (NOT THE CAT)

On our very first trip to Japan in 1991 and on our first excursion out in Kyoto, we stumbled on to an exhibition of pots by Hara Kiyoshi (b.1936). There was a wide array of pots, some large and imposing temmoku tsubo with images of horses, birds, foliage and even a jar with a scene of giraffe eating from trees, all were wonderful pieces and in the midst of these pots were just two beautiful Chinese inspired pieces in a vivid Jun (Chun) style glazes. One piece was a 10" vase and the other a mizusashi with a small bird perched on the lid acting a knob. Breaking up the surface on the mizusashi were areas of a tannish colored accents on high spots and sharper lines where the Jun had run a bit thin and the pot had various rich purple areas that accented the near perfect blue of the pot.

Obviously inspired by the archetypes that date back to the Song Dynasty of ancient China, Jun-yao (Chun-yao), the pots of Hara Kiyoshi show the influence but not slavish dependence on the straw ash glazes made famous in the Jun kilns of Yuzhou. Having studied with both Ishiguro Munemaro and Shimizu U'ichi, both Ningen Kokuho and potters inspired by Chinese ceramics, the foundations of technical and aesthetic mastery were taught by the best. In 2005 Hara was also named Ningen Kokuho and carries on the proud tradition of specializing in iron glazes as did both of his masters. Illustrated is a lovely mizusashi similar to the one I saw back in 1991 and dating to around that time. The form and glazing is exceptional with the knob in this case being a ram one of the symbols of the Asian zodiac. What I find so compelling about the pot is that it seems puffed up and ready to burst and I fear that if you were to remove the lid, it would simply deflate; I think it is the tension that makes this pot so enjoyable.